Open source news for your reading pleasure.

February 24 - 28, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at Munich's progress in dumping proprietary software, privacy on Mozilla's mobile Firefox OS, and more.

Munich furthers their commitment to open source

We've mentioned Munich's progress in converting to open source before, but the German city is back in the news again this week with another update. Now they've selected an open source groupware solution to provide email, calendar support, task management, and contact lists for city employees. Kolab Enterprise 13, originally developed for the German Federal Office for Information Security, is available in both desktop and web client versions.

New open source tool for online education released

The world of open source education projects grew a little bit larger this week with the debute of a new online education tool, Oppia, a project created as a Google "twenty percent" project. Oppia is designed to do more than just showcase content; it allows content creators to examine how students interact with the learning content in order to adjust and optimize for better learning. Complete with a full online GUI editor, collaborative content creation and version control, and extension framework for content creators, along with personalized and customizable feedback for users, this tool may be one to watch.

Firefox OS renews focus on user privacy

With security becoming a greater concern to many mobile device users, Mozilla's announcement of a new scheme for providing security to users of Firefox OS are certainly timely. Aptly dubbed the "Future of Mobile Privacy" project, Mozilla is working with Deutsche Telekom to develop new features to ensure the safety and privacy of users' data.

Move quickly to line up your open source summer internship

Want to spend this summer coding for your favorite open source project? Of course you do, and you may just be in luck! The mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2014 were announced this week, and include many great projects including Drupal, KDE, LibreOffice, Inkscape, OpenStack, and many others—190 in all. And if you're looking to go a slightly different route with your summer internship, theGNOME Outreach Program for Women is still accepting applications through March 19 for their summer program.

Hat tip to Opensource.com moderator Robin Muilwijk for sharing some of these news articles with me this week.

Jason is passionate about using technology to make the world more open, from software development to bringing sunlight to local governments. He is particularly interested in data visualization/analysis, DIY/maker culture, simulations/modeling, geospatial technologies, and cloud computing, especially OpenStack. Follow him on Twitter or Google+.

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